Post 2.621
8 Products You Own That Are Tested on Animals
by Staff Writer http://www.businessinsurance.org/8-products-you-own-that-are-tested-on-animals/
When you pick up cosmetic and household products at the grocery store, you probably don’t spend a lot of time considering what went into producing them. As long as an item’s safe for you to use and works like you want it to, what’s the big deal? You might want to start thinking about how it was tested, though. Many companies, including those that own huge brand names known across the country, use animal testing to ensure the safety of their products before they’re available to consumers. Some of these tests are necessary to show that the products meet the legal standards while others are done voluntarily to confirm that the item is as good as it can be. Whether you think animal testing is cruel in all circumstances or you believe that it’s necessary to keep humans safe and healthy, you should at least be aware that these eight products, which are probably somewhere in your home, are tested on animals.
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Windex
The magic glass cleaner, which cures every ailment according to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, is tested on animals to make sure it is safe for human use, as are many other SC Johnson products like Glade and Pledge. Labs test Windex on the eyes and skin of the animals to see if it is irritating and also test the effects of ingesting the product. While it might make you feel safer having it in the house, it doesn’t do much for the peace of mind of animal activists. -
Post-it Notes
Those handy neon notes you have stuck all over your desk don’t seem like they’re too complicated or full of potentially dangerous chemicals, but their components are still tested on animals. 3M, the company that makes Post-its along with Scotch tape and other consumer products, uses animal testing, some of which is required by law and some that is used to see how safe their products are. On Post-its, for example, the company probably tests the safety of the adhesive used. -
Trojan condoms
When looking for animal-tested products in your house, you probably don’t have to reach much farther than your bed-side table. Trojan, the popular brand of condom, is made by Church & Dwight, a global company often blasted for its use of animal testing. While the rubber itself doesn’t contain any animal by-products, making it technically OK for vegans to use, the product isn’t cruelty-free. And with more than 70% of condoms sold in the U.S. being Trojans, chances are that many Americans are using the product without knowing how it was tested. -
Mars candy
Of course we want to know the things we eat are safe to be putting in our bodies, but many groups think this kind of testing could be done with consenting human subjects rather than animals. Mars, the makers of M&Ms, Twix, Snickers, and more, tests its ingredients on rats and mice to see their different effects on the body. One test, for example, looked at what the chocolate ingredients did to the blood vessels of a rat, and involved force-feeding and slicing open the animal’s legs. Many of the experiments end with killing the animals to be able to dissect them and really see the results. Not exactly appetizing. -
Band-Aids
Though Johnson & Johnson has reduced its use of animal testing 65% since 2000, the company is still using animals to meet government testing standards when alternatives won’t provide enough data. Johnson & Johnson makes many consumer products that we use every day including baby care items, skin and hair care like Neutrogena and Clean & Clear products, Listerine, and of course, Band-Aids. Considering how often we use these items and how readily we put a Band-Aid on our kids’ boo-boos, we really should know more about the tests that are performed before these products hit the shelves. -
Kleenex
We rely on Kleenex when we’ve got the sniffles, but Kleenex’s parent company, Kimberly-Clark, relies on animal testing to make sure its products are safe for consumers. Other brands in the Kimberly-Clark family include Cottonelle bath tissues, Scott paper towels, Huggies, and Kotex. While the corporation supports research for non-animal test methods and only uses animal testing when it has to, you should still be aware that these common household products, including the one you just sneezed into, use animals as test subjects. -
Iams pet food
Of all the products in your house, you would probably think that your pet food would be among the most animal friendly. Not so if you’re buying Iams. The pet product company tests its wares on dogs and cats, and while they have ended the horribly invasive procedures they used to perform on the dogs and cats (like cutting muscle off of their bodies), they still use as many as 700 dogs and cats to test the nutrition of their products. They also still perform invasive experiments on animals other than dogs and cats. -
Vaseline
Vaseline petroleum jelly and the other lotions and skin products under that name are great for keeping your skin moist and crack-free. But the skin of the lab animals used to test the products isn’t so lucky, since it has to suffer all of the harmful effects so the product is safe when it hits the shelf. Unilever, who makes Vaseline, also produces other popular products like Dove soaps, Lipton, Slim-Fast, and Axe. Many of these other items are also tested on animals to check whether they’re safe to use on humans. This corporation and many others place the priority on their consumer, which often means that animals end up being harmed. Whether or not that’s a bad thing is up to you.
You laugh at jokes. You laugh at guys getting kicked in the crotch. You laugh when you and your girlfriends get together to talk about how adorably clueless all men are. And yet science still can’t vouch for why exactly we do this. We start laughing around 3.5 or 4 months old and scientists believe it’s a way to build relationships rather than a response specifically to something funny. Researchers are still trying to figure out what triggers laughter in the brain and why being tickled, which feels a bit like torture sometimes, makes us laugh so much.
Can you imagine the first kiss in history? It makes you wonder if those people just thought, “What would happen if we mashed our mouths together?” or if it’s always been a part of human nature. We may never know, though scientists are certainly looking into it. These special kiss researchers are called philematologists and they’ve come up with theories on the origins of kissing and looked at the biological effects. Some say kissing is a learned behavior, evidenced by the fact that 10% of humans don’t kiss at all. Other scientists say that kissing is an instinct and point to the fact that some animals do it. Whichever way it is, we’re just thankful that locking lips is an accepted way of showing affection.
This may not be a strictly human behavior, but it’s puzzling nonetheless. Why is it that we open our airways to take big gaping breaths? And why do we start yawning when we see someone else doing it, or even when we just think about it? (Are you yawning yet?) The answers are unclear; different theories attribute it to a number of causes. Some believe it’s simply an involuntary act that happens when your lungs need more air. Some say the 
You know the feeling. You just tripped on the street, were talking about someone when they were right behind you, or got called on in a class you were not at all prepared for, and suddenly you can feel your whole face begin to burn. Blushing is a common response to embarrassment, but scientists aren’t sure why it happens. The how is explained by increased adrenaline allowing the blood vessels in your face to expand, allowing more blood, and thus redness, into your cheeks. Making blushing even more mysterious is that blushing from alcohol or sexual arousal has nothing to do with adrenaline, according to scientists.
Dreaming is one of our most fascinating behaviors, partially because it’s impossible to share with others. Sure, you can try to explain that strange nightmare you had, but you find yourself without a lot of explanations: “We were in our house, but it wasn’t really our house. Somehow you were there, but then you were someone else. Wait, why was it scary again?” Dreams themselves are hard for us to hold onto, and the explanation for why they occur is equally challenging to grasp. Scientists have been theorizing on the purpose of dreams for centuries, but we’re still as far away from an answer as ever. Some guesses are that we’re practicing our response to a frightening situation, that our brains are sorting through the knowledge we’ve gained during the day and purging themselves of the unnecessary bits, or that we are working through our emotions. Conclusive evidence for any of these theories seems totally out of reach.
Hiccups, the annoying, squeaky jolts you sometimes get, are a reflex of some kind, but exactly what they’re reacting to is a mystery. A hiccup occurs when your diaphragm contracts and you inhale suddenly; the sound is produced by your vocal cords closing quickly. People can get hiccups from emotional distress, swallowing too much air, drinking a lot of alcohol (classic), or even just consuming a hot beverage. All these causes make it hard for doctors to pinpoint exactly what’s going on in the body. Common ideas are that something irritates your diaphragm, causing it to spasm, or there’s a disruption in your nerve pathways.
Since we’ve been crying since birth, we rarely think about why we do it. But we’re the only species that we know of with water gushing out of our eyes when we experience emotions. Scientists think it may have done something positive for the advancement of our species, perhaps acting as a signal that enemies wouldn’t pick up, and that’s why we’ve continued to do it over the years. We now cry when we’re feeling all kinds of emotions, ranging from sadness to joy, frustration to pain, even though we’re not trying to hide our weaknesses from predators. Crying is also a way to provoke empathy from others, which may have built strong communities among our ancestors.
While blinking has the obvious benefit of moistening our eyes, we do it more than is necessary to perform this function. Researchers think the reason is probably psychological because we blink more as adults than we did when we were babies — 10 to 15 times a minute compared to just once a minute for infants. We still don’t know exactly why this is, but they’ve found that we blink less frequently when we’re really engaged in or concentrated on what we’re doing.
We hope you will never experience this sensation, but it’s one of the most mysterious phenomena that happens to humans. Amputees often say they feel like their amputated limb is still there. Some can just feel it, while others can feel actual pain in their phantom limb. Doctors aren’t sure why this happens but they have plenty of complicated explanations they think could account for it, such as severed nerve endings and the reorganization of the somatosensory cortex. We may never understand where these phantom limbs come from, but many are treated with antidepressants, electrical spinal cord stimulation, or even using a mirror box to visualize the phantom limb and practice relaxing it.
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